DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin,
and we're looking at Caspar David Friedrich's "Abbey
in the Oakwood."
It is a large painting, and it was
one of a pair that included "The Monk by the Sea."
This is a very somber image, and it really
is a perfect example of the way Friedrich
used landscape in order to represent issues of human life
and of the divine.
DR. BETH HARRIS: That's right.
In this painting, we see the ruins of an abbey,
an old abbey, and a procession of figures entering
this ruined abbey carrying a coffin.
And so immediately we have a sense of the passage of time,
of the transience of human existence.
We're also looking at, it seems, the dead of winter.
And perhaps it's sunset.
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: If you look at the remnant of architecture
that's left, you have this-- first
of all, this very forlorn sense from the ruins themselves.
But you see this old lancet window
that's fallen into disrepair.
No glass remains.
Then you have a real sense of the grandeur
of the original space, but now what's left
is just the futility of human experience,
the futility of human effort.
DR. BETH HARRIS: And what we see is that nature is eternal,
but what man creates is transient.
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: You have the monks themselves
going through their ancient ritual of burial.
But you see that the cemetery that surrounds them in the snow
is not well tended, is haphazard, and seems
to be itself falling into disrepair.
The abbey refers back to the medieval tradition,
but that's now fallen away.
Older than that are the oak trees,
which might have represented for Friedrich
the Druidic traditions, the pre-Christian traditions.
These truly ancient oaks, gnarled and terrifying
in their silhouettes, but that speak
of a tradition as witnesses that are
even older than Christianity, and then
beyond that the crescent moon and the sky.
When you were speaking, that's the nature that I was looking
at, that is permanent, that is trans-historical,
that moves beyond even the growth and death of the trees,
certainly of the architecture of man's efforts.
DR. BETH HARRIS: The moon having a sense of the cosmos even
beyond the seasons of the Earth.
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: That's right.
And so you have this sense of human time.
You have this sense of nature's time.
And then you have this sense of the time of God's space.
And in fact, if there's any optimism in this image,
it is that moon.
It is the faintest crescent, and it might wane even more
and become a new moon, but then it will regenerate.
And there is this possibility for rebirth.
You mentioned that it's the dead of winter,
but spring will come.
And so even if it seems quite distant
now in this sort of bleak twilight,
there is the sense that there will be renewal.
DR. BETH HARRIS: So we may have a suggestion of resurrection
in the cycles of the moon.
We have the crosses that are part of the cemetery.
We have the cross that forms part of the ruin of the abbey
and that suggestion of resurrection.
I think what's so interesting about Friedrich
is that he's imbuing a landscape with this very, very
serious meaning, almost the way that in the past,
people had looked to the iconography
of Christian paintings.
Friedrich is looking for a modern language with which
to express these trans-historical human feelings
contemplating our role in the universe,
and trying to make sense of all of those layers of time
that you referred to before.
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: That's exactly right.
Friedrich is finding a new way of representing
these eternal issues.
And it makes sense that he would have
to, because this is now the beginning of the 19th century.
Friedrich is now living in a rational culture,
and the idea of using the iconography of the Renaissance
or even of the Baroque would feel implausible.
It wouldn't make sense.
And so Friedrich, this artist who
was trained in Copenhagen, who grew up in Greifswald,
which was then part of Sweden on the southern coast
of the Baltic, is looking towards the very extreme, cold,
northern landscape as a way of expressing
these ideas of the eternal.